Title:
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Designing interactive musical interfaces : musical and collaborative media projects using tangible and gestural interfaces
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The focus of this thesis is to explore interactivity within musical composition.
I start by examining the evolution of the relationship between artist, medium, and audience
during the 20th century regarding how it distanced itself from a primarily hierarchical
construct towards a more interdependent and flexible structure. The once established model
where the composer's creative voice was the only one echoed in one's work has thereafter
been challenged.
Gradually, new compositional techniques appeared that allowed performers to influence the
musical outcome of a composer's work (e.g. compositional techniques such as indeterminism,
alternative notation system such as graphical scores, etc.).
Towards the end of the 20th century, technological advances in the field of human-computer
interaction (HCI) accelerated this trend by providing artists with the ability to construct
customised musical interactive interfaces. Such interfaces have the potential to facilitate the
involvement of audience members and extend the role of performers so they can leave a
temporal mark on the final artistic work.
In the course of my research thesis, I experiment with the designing of such musical
interactive interfaces. I focus on the creation of solo projects, aiming at assisting studio based
composition and enhancing musical performance, as well as collaborative cross-disciplinary
projects (involving choreography, theatre, etc.) where the performers' and the audience's
participation influence the musical outcome. In my commentary, I describe with a practical
perspective the reasoning behind their physical, as well as conceptual attributes on a per case
study basis.
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